Without fail, every person who has picked up the Pixel 2 XL has
said virtually the same thing: “It feels like it’s made out of
plastic.” I said it myself when I first held it. Of course,
neither the Pixel 2 nor the Pixel 2 XL are made out of plastic.
They’re made out of Gorilla Glass and aluminum, just like every
other high-end phone these days.

But Google coated all that aluminum with a textured finish that
hides most of the antenna lines and also makes the phones easier
to grip. Google took what could have been a visually impressive
design and covered it up in the name of ergonomics. It literally
made a metal phone feel like a plastic one. It chose function
over form.

Interesting design decision. Apple has moved from aluminum to glass (and last year a glassy-feeling coating on the jet black iPhones). Samsung has moved to glass. Part of this is that most top-tier phones this year support inductive charging (which doesn’t work through aluminum), but even here with the Pixels, they’ve moved away from feeling like aluminum.

On the display colors:

The screen, especially on the 2 XL, has been polarizing. Google
opted to tune the display to sRGB (the Galaxy S8, by comparison,
offers four gamut options), so it looks a little more like the
iPhone’s screen. But more than that, on the 2 XL the colors look
muted in a way that many Android users I’ve shown it to found
distasteful (even with the “vivid colors” setting turned on). I
think many Android phones, especially from Samsung, are so vivid
as to be phantasmagoric, so Google’s choice was to make this more
“naturalistic.”

My take ever since last year (I bought a Pixel 1) is that the Pixels are targeting people whose taste runs toward the iPhone hardware-wise, but who prefer Android over iOS. Actually, not Android over iOS, but the Google ecosystem over Apple’s. They’re iPhones for Google people. I find Samsung displays to be technically impressive but downright garish in terms of saturation.